Tempers flared at Wednesday’s Monterey Park City Council meeting as a decision cast by the three-member majority will force the other two off the council, having to wait two years if they want to run again.

The discussion got so heated, one member stormed off before a crucial vote but not before calling a colleague an “ass.”

Since November, Monterey Park has been working toward switching from electing its City Council at-large — in which the entire city can vote for all five seats — to district-based, in which residents elect one candidate to represent their portion of the city. The often complicated part is dividing a whole into five parts and figuring out when each seat is up for election.

The council was set to select a district map at its meeting Wednesday and found consensus in supporting one created by resident Jason Dhing which would set equitable boundaries for each district and create a majority-Latino District 3 on the south side of the city. The thought behind district-based elections is to protect the voting rights of minority residents, resulting in better representation.

In addition to proposing the council approve Dhing’s map, Mayor Pro Tem Hans Liang proposed setting the elections for districts 2, 3 and 4 in March 2020 and districts 1 and 5 in 2022.

The end result of such a move would be booting two council members, Mitchell Ing and Teresa Real Sebastian, both of whose terms expire next year, off the council. Had their districts been chosen for the 2020 ballot, they could have run for re-election with the possibility of clinching a consecutive term.

Ing and Real Sebastian live in districts 1 and 5, respectively. Liang’s proposal was affirmed with support from Mayor Peter Chan and Councilman Stephen Lam. It will see Liang and Chan serving until 2022 and Lam’s seat up for grabs in 2020.

Liang, who is set to term out in 2022 regardless of when the district elections are held, said one of the reasons he proposed the schedule he did was because Ing and Real Sebastian will already have served three and two consecutive terms, respectively.

However, because voters approved term limits in 2013 — midway into Ing’s second and Real Sebastian’s first terms — the limits did not begin applying to them until they were re-elected in 2015, leaving them free to run again in 2020 after serving an extra year after switching the city’s March elections to even years to comply with a 2015 state law.

“Even though our term limit law technically allows them to run for another term, in terms of principle, they believed eight consecutive years was a good standard for everybody except themselves, it seems,” Liang said in a Thursday phone interview.

Ing and Real Sebastian both supported imposing a term limit — in which elected officials could serve a maximum two consecutive terms with council members allowed to run after spending two years out of office — when it was first proposed in 2012.

“You’ve got eight years to do what you came to do, and then it’s only right that the person step down and invite someone else to do it,” Real Sebastian said in a 2012 interview.

Real Sebastian said Liang took her 2012 quote out of context and that she was commenting in theory about why a two-term limit made sense as opposed to allowing more terms.

There was no question in 2013 that the term limit law would not apply retroactively to the sitting council members and would allow anyone, incumbents included, to serve two consecutive four-year terms moving forward, Ing said.

Meanwhile, Chan, Lam and Liang made it possible for Lam to run for re-election in 2020 by including his District 2 for that year’s election.

“Current law gave three of us the right to run for another term, and they took that right away from Mitchell and myself but protected Lam’s right,” Real Sebastian said in a Friday phone interview.

Frustrations came to a head when Chan, Lam and Liang cast their votes in favor of Liang’s proposal.

“You’re kidding me,” Ing said at the meeting. “You made this motion just to knock us out.” He called Liang an “ass” and left the dais before the vote.

“You know what, Mr. Hans Liang, you should really be ashamed of yourself for pulling that kind of political maneuver,” she said shortly before leaving the council chambers as well with items still on the agenda.

Christopher Yee is a reporter for the Pasadena Star-News and San Gabriel Valley Tribune covering cities in the west and central parts of the San Gabriel Valley. He grew up in Monterey Park and studied journalism at East Los Angeles College and UC Berkeley. You may find him at Dodger Stadium or at the Staples Center for L.A. Kings games.

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